Podcast: "Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law"
A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?
Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.
Henry Jenkins interview from SXSW with the Austin American-Statesman
Austin American-Statesman: I work at a daily newspaper, and everyone around here's talking about the future of our business, and one idea that's been floating around the past few weeks is this idea of getting people to pay for access to newspaper Web sites. And one entity that keeps coming in for criticism is Huffingtonpost.com, which repurposes newspaper copy for free. But I can't help but think that this critique misses certain benefits that something like Huffington brings to the sites it appropriates content from -- that it makes some of this material more 'spreadable,' as you say. Do you think that's the case?
Jenkins: I think that the notions of spreadability that I'm talking about have real implications for news and journalism. All of these mechanisms, it seems to me, encourage people to engage with the content of the news. The whole system would fall apart if there weren't professional journalists in the mix, generating content, setting agendas, doing the investigative reporting and field work necessary for real public conversations to take place. But historically newspapers are very poor spaces for serious back-and-forth communication between citizens. I think what we're seeing are emerging models which allow citizens to take that media into their own communities, to talk about it among themselves, to organize around content that's particularly significant to whatever group they belong to, and to generate their own kinds of commentary that responds to and reflects the issues of the day. And I do think that that's actually in the long-term interest of the mission of journalism, if not the business plan of newspapers.
The problem is how to bring those two things back together.
Of course there are good reasons to shake employees' personal networks when hiring. People who play together well are likely to work together well. (Henry Jenkins, a professor at M.I.T., has suggested that companies may one day recruit whole groups that form around online games.) In addition, an employee understands that a friend's performance affects their own reputation, and consequently will avoid referring incompetents and perpetual procrastinators. Nothing kills a relationship faster than working all night to correct the screw-ups your gormless chum introduced into a major project.
Recent developments in what MIT media theorist Henry Jenkins calls "media convergence" point to significant effects of "transmediation" where religious stories may unfold across multiple media platforms. With the proliferation of Web-based and mobile communication devices, the production and dissemination of viral e-mail, instant messaging--and now tweets--may accelerate the speed and intensity of message spread and traction.
To this point, one pastor has blogged about how he had prayed about a prayer request that he had received on Twitter, and in turn retweeted the message to everyone who followed him on Twitter.
"I've been following the blogosphere for a long time," said Henry Jenkins (@henryjenkins), the head of MIT's Comparative Media Studies center. As a human-to-human communications medium, he said, "I've never seen the scale and volume of the flow of information that Twitter is facilitating."
Ian Condry at Hip-Hop Worldwide: More Than a Nation
Among the events popping off at Harvard's newly interactive archive: a week-long global hip-hop film festival, a Hip-Hop Worldwide panel featuring renowned anthropologist Ian Condry and rap-journalism godfather Davey D, and a series of meetings and lectures addressing hip-hop's constructive role in the global AIDS crisis. In other words, topics not addressed on the latest T-Pain and G-Unit albums.
Nick Monfort on Atari and video games in the Boston Globe
IDEAS: We live now in a world where people often are sitting alone in a room playing something. Very different from the Atari philosophy, which, to me, was about games as a social experience. The games were always better with two players.
MONTFORT: I wouldn't want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together. Maybe we forgot some things that were good about play experience. Maybe we want the computer to be a device that is more like a hearth that members of the family come around and use to interact with each other.
Podcast: "Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan"
Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology University of Michigan
In humans, gender--femininity, masculinity--is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Robertson explored and interrogated the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She showed that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a "posthuman sexism," and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.
In this Gamasutra-exclusive postmortem, the creators of IGF Grand Prize finalist and XNA Community Games standout CarneyVale: Showtime discuss what went right and wrong during its creation.
When MIT Professor of Anthropology Stefan Helmreich set out to examine the world of marine microbiologists for a new book, his research took an unexpected twist.
Helmreich, who has been recognized for his innovative cultural anthropology work, had decided to study scientists who chase some of the world's smallest creatures in some of the world's most forbidding places. So he spent long hours interviewing microbial biologists such as Penny Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT, and Edward DeLong, professor in MIT's Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an associate member at the Broad Institute.
